Skip to main content

Ludum Dare 29: Beneath the Surface

I'm halfway through making a game for Ludum Dare 29. The theme this time around is "Beneath the Surface". For once I've had an idea right from the start that's practical, fun and in keeping with the theme. It's a lovely change from my usual pattern of starting with an idea that turns out to be impractical or boring & having to start over halfway through the competition. So on that basis alone I have high hopes for this one.

Here it is: Project Tethys

It's an underwater shoot-and-rescue-em-up inspired by the likes of Defender and Resogun. You control a state-of-the-art combat submarine tasked with defending an underwater research facility from an invading army. Or at least, that's what it should be if I can finish it in time...

The controls are arrow keys or WASD to move, left mouse button to fire.

There's still loads left to do: implementing the rescue mechanic; sound effects; enemy AI; a high score table; a menu system; better models and textures; a tutorial; and lots of polishing. Here's hoping I can get it all done!

One thing that's different this time around is that I've been using Unity instead of my own Javascript framework. This is my first time doing anything serious with Unity & it's been absolutely brilliant! It's such a productive environment. The documentation is absolutely first rate and the tutorials are some of the best I've ever encountered. If anyone on the Unity team is reading this: thank you!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Assert no lock required

This is a technique I learnt about from Jason Gregory's excellent book, Game Engine Architecture (3rd Edition) . If you have a shared resource accessed by multiple threads, where you're fairly certain that it's only ever accessed by one thread at a time, you can use an assert() to check for this at debug time without having to pay the runtime cost of locking a mutex. The implementation is fairly straightforward: class UnnecessaryMutex { public: void lock() { assert(!_locked); _locked = true; } void unlock() { assert(_locked); _locked = false; } private: volatile bool _locked = false; }; #ifdef ENABLE_LOCK_ASSERTS #define BEGIN_ASSERT_LOCK_NOT_REQUIRED(mutex) (mutex).lock() #define END_ASSERT_LOCK_NOT_REQUIRED(mutex) (mutex).unlock() #else #define BEGIN_ASSERT_LOCK_NOT_REQUIRED(mutex) #define END_ASSERT_LOCK_NOT_REQUIRED(mutex) #endif Usage is equally straightforward: UnnecessaryMutex gMutex; void PossiblyOverlappingFunction
Post a Comment
Read more

Triangle bounding boxes in a single byte

Just thought of a way to store the bounding box for a single triangle in only one byte. It's not really practical or something you'd ever really want to use, but what the hell. Assume we have some kind of indexed mesh structure with a list of vertex positions and a list of triangle indices:   struct Mesh {     std::vector<vec3> verts;     std::vector<uvec3> triangles;   }; We can find the bounding box of a triangle by taking the min and max of all three vertices:   vec3 Mesh::lowerBound(uint32_t tri) const {     vec3 v0 = verts[triangles[tri].x];     vec3 v1 = verts[triangles[tri].y];     vec3 v2 = verts[triangles[tri].z];     return min(min(v0, v1), v2);   }   vec3 Mesh::upperBound(uint32_t tri) const {     vec3 v0 = verts[triangles[tri].x];     vec3 v1 = verts[triangles[tri].y];     vec3 v2 = verts[triangles[tri].z];     return max(max(v0, v1), v2);   } This is nice and simple and probably way better than what I'm about to suggest. W
2 comments
Read more

LD_DEBUG

Posting this mainly as a reminder to myself... If you ever find yourself needing to figure out a dynamic library loading problem on Linux, LD_DEBUG can be a massive help. This is an environment variable you can set to make the dynamic linker print out a ton of useful diagnostic info. There are a number of different values which control the amount and type of diagnostics printed. One of the values is help; if you set LD_DEBUG to this and run executable it will print out a list of all the available options along with brief descriptions. For example, on my Linux workstation at the office: > LD_DEBUG=help cat Valid options for the LD_DEBUG environment variable are: libs display library search paths reloc display relocation processing files display progress for input file symbols display symbol table processing bindings display information about symbol binding versions display version dependencies all all previous options combi
Post a Comment
Read more